eaking
for the work of the tapissier or weaver, although time has distorted
the faces beyond the lines of absolute beauty; and hatching
accomplishes the shading.

The repairer has been at work on this valuable set, not the
intelligent restorer, but the frank bungler who has not hesitated to
turn certain pieces wrong side out, nor to set in large sections
obviously cut from another tapestry. It is surmised that the set
contained one more piece--it would be regrettable, indeed, if that
missing square had been cut up for repairs.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns these tapestries
through the altruistic generosity of J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq. They are
the most interesting primitive work which are on public view in our
country, and awake to enthusiasm even the most insensate dullard, who
has a half hour to stand before them and realise all they mean in art,
in morals and in history.

To the lives of the Prophets and Saints we can always turn; from the
romance of men and women we can never turn away. And so when a Gothic
tapestry is found that frankly omits Biblical folk and gives us a true
picture of men and women of the almost impenetrable time back of the
fifteen hundreds, tells us what they wore, in what manner they
comported themselves, that tapestry has a sure and peculiar value. The
surviving art of the Middle Ages smacks strong of saints, paints at
full length the people of Moses' time, but unhappily gives only a bust
of their contemporaries.

[Illustration: FIFTEENTH CENTURY FRENCH TAPESTRY

Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

[Illustration: THE LIFE OF CHRIST

Flemish Tapestry, second half of Fifteenth Century. Boston Museum
of Fine Arts]

Hangings portraying secular subjects were less often woven than those
of religion and morals, but also the former have less lustily outlived
the centuries, owing to the habit of tearing them from the
suspending hooks and packing them about from chateau to chateau, to
soften surroundings for the wandering visitor. Thus it comes that we
have little tapestried record of a time when knights and ladies and
ill-assorted attributes walked hand in hand, a time of chivalry and
cruelty, of roses and war, of sumptuousness and crudity, of privation
and indulgence, of simplicity and deceit.

If prowling among old books has tempted the hand to take from the
shelves one of those quaint luxuries known as a "Book of Hours," there
before the eye lies the spirit